In recent years, with the development and progress of digital technology, the collision and fusion between technology and innovative ideas has aroused artists world-widely to conduct new trials in art creation and explorations. In Nov. 20th, “UNKNOWN REALITY”, an art valley practice exhibition hosted by SJTU-ICCI, was opened at Powerlong Art Center. Art visiting scholars from multiple countries gathered in Shanghai, exchanging ideas about the buildings of the artistic collisions between the virtual world and the reality daily life in digital era, and also exploring the new mode to cultivate art talents. Nearly one hundred people, including Art students and teachers from Shanghai colleges, art lovers,curators and collectors attended the opening ceremony and the exhibition.

The only change is unchanged- artistic thoughts towards digital era

Digital era, theboomingly-developing internet technology and digital media has broken down the barriers of time and space to make the whole world a real “global village”. The interactive medias have dramatically changed our lifestyles and social behaviors, and this has posed great influences on artists’ thinking and creating, which could be manifested among those exhibited works.

David Ricardo Rodriguez Diaz

David Ricardo Rodriguez Diaz from Columbia University, rightly showed the intercommunicated society at internetage in his work “SELF”--- David searched his name in the internet and broughttogether those portraits of netizens of the same name as his around the world, thus the “self-portrait” was completed. A vast number of anonymous “David Rodriguez” formed the group self-portrait in the internet society, which presents the inner individual loneliness when immersing into the world of data.

Zhai Guangtao

The work of “When AI Looks in a Mirror” by Zhai Guangtao and Zhang Kaiwei, bases on the concept of AI, wishing to probe into how conscious AI would treat and recognize itself in a mirror, which, in the era of AI-gathering, raises a thought-provoking question---how AI will break through the limits of self-consciousness to deal with the relationship between the external world and inner emotions.

Alexandre Ouairy

French art scholar Alexandre Ouairy threw a sharp question in his work “Glitch Series”, that is--- Are we now in the era of “Artificial Intelligence” or “Artificial IntellectualDisability”? His works expresses that the technology has its own limits, such as technical glitches, or “digital gibberish” of when visual images displayed. Therefore, our understandings on world history, cultures or the world itself will be probably distorted due to data “glitches”.

Pin San

Chinese art scholar Pin San prefers to apply folk art to explore the unknown reality. He gets used to create an imaginary illusion in the way of “tales of the miraculous”, in which the reality and the virtuality, the real world and the fantasy world, human and animals all appear, and all kinds of beings with spiritual darkness in current age are deeply depicted and revealed. His works are filled with dreams, fantasies, poetic imaginations, interests, as well as literature humors.

Olasyuk Alëna's work

Ukrainian artist Olasyuk Alëna focuses more on self-reflections, expressed by her work “Texture/Contrast Study”. Based on Chinese traditional ink painting, she constantly draws lines to point out the question boundaries in the works, and also borrowed the repeated comparisons between black and white, firmness and softness, simpleness and complexities, traditional and modern to conduct self-reflections. Olasyuk conveyed, “such repeated creation could make me feel the disparities of senses, which helps me go beyond the boundaries to the extreme end of ‘complexity’ or ‘simpleness’.”

Peter H. Van De Locht

German sculpture artist, Peter H. Van De Locht, is particularly keen on expressing his artistic opinion through different textures. He lived in Holland at his young ages, but spent his later years mainly in China with a great interest in Chinese traditional culture. “Bright Sunshine”, a sculpture work by him, presents a young lady dancing in the sun, with a golden-shinning face. The elegant pose is perfectly displayed in space orders, which undoubtedly showed his unique thoughts and insights towards arts and aesthetics.

The future has come-focusing on artistic talents in digital era

When facing the booming internet technology and rapid social development, what skills and qualities should those future artistic talents possess in order to freely deal with the quick social changes and technological progresses? In response to this question, the ART VALLEY program by SJTU-ICCI has provided special thoughts and answers.

With the principle of talents training “internalization, cross-discipline, industry-oriented”, the “ART VALLEY” program, having been successfully held four times by ICCI, yearly invites overseas artists to station in the college, or open up art academic

events to carry out the practice of art education; and it also innovates the training mode of comprehensive college art management personnel, improves the level of public artistic literacy, and constructs an art ecosystem characterized by the integration and development of cultural industry.

In the past four years, the program has invited nearly thirty internationally renowned artscholars  from the United Kingdom,

France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Iceland, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Japan, the United States, France, Colombia and other countries and regions to station in the college, and has also collaborated with domestic famous artists, independent curators and professionals to conduct six large-scaled exhibitions, more than twenty campus lectures of “Most Art”, and thirty plus public lectures in Shanghai, covering an audience of totally 200,000 more. Such cross-border and cross-disciplinary interactive teaching modes have accumulated solid experience in exploring the ways of coordinated innovation and development of new liberal arts and arts.

Zhang Weimin

Zhang Weimin, Dean of ICCI, stated that, the college has closely followed the trend of “internet digitalization and teaching virtualization” in art education since the covid-19 outbreak, wishing to further adapt to the new challenges posed by the internet era, the intelligent era and the digital era for the cultivation of artistic talents. “We are committed to the integration of art education and artistic practice. In addition to making positive use of the campus academic resources, we are also actively introducing social artistic resources, attracting outstanding independent scholars, curators and artists, providing students with more practical opportunities, and all of which will jointly open up new horizons for students, helpful to train art management personnel who can truly adapt to social changes and needs. ”